He contemplated the bottles in his cabinet before pulling a miraculously full bottle of vodka from the shelf. “I hate when you’re defeatist,” he muttered, shoving past where Serefin stood to make his way into Serefin’s bedchambers.
Kacper deflated some, shoulders slumping. “What will they do, I wonder? Hang me? Toss me in the dungeons and forget about me?” “You’re being unusually calm about this,” Kacper noted. Yes, Zaneta had betrayed him, and, yes, he had died for it, but did she deserve the terrifying fate Malachiasz had chosen for her? It was a constant, festering point of anxiety that had settled underneath his skin. Tragically awkward situation, but, there it is! Nothing to be done.” “Oh, terribly sorry, she com mitted some light treason and the Black Vulture decided she would be better served amongst his kind. Zaneta’s family had been demanding answers for months. Nicking his finger, he lit a few candles with the magic sparking from his blood and wiped his hand, movements slow. “ Kse szi Ruminski is involved,” Kacper continued. He’d anticipated it from the slavhki who had been supporters of his father. “There’s a collective meeting happening,” Kacper answered, voice soft. He had let the tense whispers go on and put off explaining fully how his father had died. It was never a matter of what or when, only who would be the first one brave enough to strike.
The nobility had never liked him, not when he was the High Prince, and certainly not since his coronation. The hammered iron crown had long since been placed on his head, his palm cut and bled on an altar as he was named king of Tranavia-his downfall was oncoming. “Any trouble is of your own making,” the voice snipped. Those strange intonations hummed constantly in his veins. The thin, reedy voice that needled him from a place past death. Horrors at the edges of his awareness and that voice. An empty glass on the floor within reach and a book hanging over the arm where Serefin had put it to mark his place as he considered the same thing he had considered every night for the last four months: dreams of moths and blood and monsters. To rouse him, clearly, but he probably wasn’t particularly surprised to find Serefin lying on the chaise in his sitting room, one foot braced on the ground, the other leg kicked up against the back. He was awake when Kacper slipped into his chambers. No, he did it because it was easier to drink himself into oblivion than face the nightmares. It wasn’t like he spent his nights awake because he was expecting another tragedy. He knew that span of hours intimately, but even knowledge of the inevitable wasn’t enough to make it less painful. It was a time when knives were unsheathed, when plans were created and seen into fruition. Serefin Meleski inhabited the sliver of night that was ripe for betrayal. A viper, a tomb, a trick of the light, Velyos is always reaching for whatever does not belong to him.
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